The Second Sex

  She does not resign herself right away. Sometimes, out of despair, she clings to her husband; she overwhelms him more imperiously than ever with her ministrations; but the routine of conjugal life has been too well established; either she has known for a long time that her husband does not need her, or he does not seem precious enough to her to justify her any longer. Assuring the maintenance of their shared life is as contingent a task as watching over herself alone. She turns to her children with hope: for them the die is not yet cast; the world, the future, are open to them; she would like to dive into it after them. The woman who has had the chance of giving birth at an advanced age finds herself privileged: she is still a young mother when the others are becoming grandparents. But in general, between forty and fifty, the mother sees her little ones become adults. It is at the very instant they are escaping her that she passionately attempts to live through them.

  Her attitude is different depending on whether she is counting on being saved by a son or a daughter; she usually puts her strongest hope in her son. Here he finally comes to her from the far past, the man whose marvelous appearance she waited to see coming over the horizon; from the first scream of the newborn she has waited for this day when he will hand out all the treasures the father was never able to satisfy her with. During that time, she has doled out slaps and purges, but she has forgotten them; he whom she carried in her womb was already one of these demigods who govern the world and women’s destiny: now he will recognize her in the glory of her motherhood. He will defend her against her spouse’s supremacy, avenge her for the lovers she has had and those she has not had; he will be her liberator, her savior. She will behave like the seductive and ostentatious girl waiting for Prince Charming; when she is walking beside him, elegant and still charming, she thinks she looks like his “older sister”; she is delighted if—taking after the heroes of American films—he teases and jostles her, laughing and respectful: with proud humility she recognizes the virile superiority of the one she carried in her womb. To what extent can these feelings be considered incestuous? It is sure that when she thinks of herself complaisantly on her son’s arm, the expression “older sister” prudishly expresses ambivalent fantasies; when she sleeps, when she does not control herself, her musings sometimes carry her very far; but I have already said that dreams and fantasies are far from always expressing the hidden desire of a real act: they are often sufficient; they are the completion of a desire that only requires an imaginary satisfaction. When the mother plays in a more or less veiled way at seeing her son as a lover, it is just a game. Real eroticism usually has little place in this couple. But it is a couple; it is from the depths of her femininity that the mother hails in her son the sovereign man; she puts herself in his hands with as much fervor as a lover, and in exchange for this gift, she counts on being raised to the right hand of the god. To gain this assumption, the woman in love appeals to the lover’s freedom: she generously assumes a risk; her anxious demands are the ransom. The mother reckons she has acquired holy rights by the simple fact of giving birth; she does not expect her son to see himself in her in order for her to consider him her creation, her property; she is less demanding than the woman lover because she is of a more tranquil bad faith; having made a being of flesh, she makes an existence her own: she appropriates its acts, accomplishments, and merits. In exalting her fruit, she is carrying her own person to the heights.

  Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient. Things may not turn out as one wished. It often happens that a son is no more than a good-for-nothing, a hooligan, a failure, a lost cause, an empty promise, ungrateful. The mother has her own ideas about the hero her son is supposed to embody. Nothing is rarer than a mother who authentically respects the human person her child is, who recognizes his freedom even in his failures, who assumes with him the risks implied by any engagement. One more often encounters mothers who emulate that over-glorified Spartan woman who cavalierly condemns her son to glory or death; on earth, the son has to justify his mother’s existence by taking hold of values she herself respects for their mutual advantage. The mother demands that the child-god’s projects conform to her own ideal and that their success be assured. Every woman wants to give birth to a hero, a genius; but all mothers of heroes and geniuses began by proclaiming they were breaking their mothers’ hearts. It is in reaction to his mother that man most often wins the trophies she dreamed of displaying for herself and that she does not recognize even when he lays them at her feet. Though she may approve in principle of her son’s undertakings, she is torn by a contradiction similar to one that tortures the woman in love. To justify his life—and his mother’s—the son must surpass her toward his ends; and to attain them, he is led to risk his health and put himself in danger: but he contests the value of the gift she gave him when he places certain goals above the pure fact of living. She is shocked by this; she reigns sovereign over man only if this flesh she has engendered is for him the supreme good: he does not have the right to destroy this work she has produced through suffering. “You’ll tire yourself out, you’ll make yourself ill, you’ll be sorry,” she drones in his ears. Yet she knows very well that to live is not enough, or else procreation itself would be superfluous; she is the first to be irritated if her offspring is a loafer, a coward. She is never at rest. When he goes to war, she wants him home alive but decorated. In his career, she wishes him to “make it” but trembles when he overworks. Whatever he does, she always worries that she will stand by powerless in the unfolding of a story that is hers but over which she has no control: she fears he will make the wrong decision, that he will not succeed, that if he succeeds, he will ruin his health. Even if she has confidence in him, differences of age and sex keep a real complicity from being established between her son and her; she is not informed about his work; no collaboration is demanded of her.

  This is why the mother remains unsatisfied, even if she admires her son with inordinate pride. Believing that she has not only engendered a being of flesh but also founded an absolutely necessary existence, she feels retrospectively justified; but having rights is not an occupation: to fill her days, she needs to perpetuate her beneficent activity; she wants to feel indispensable to her god; the mystification of devotion in this case is denounced in the most brutal manner: his wife will strip her of her functions. The hostility she feels to this stranger who “steals” her child has often been described. The mother has raised the contingent facticity of parturition to the height of divine mystery: she refuses to accept that a human decision can have more weight. In her eyes, values are preestablished, they proceed from nature, from the past: she does not understand the value of a freely made engagement. Her son owes her his life; what does he owe this woman he did not know until yesterday? It is through some evil spell that she convinced him of the existence of a bond that until now did not exist; she is devious, calculating, and dangerous. The mother impatiently waits for the imposture to be revealed; encouraged by the old myth of the good mother with healing hands who binds the wounds inflicted on him by the bad wife, she watches her son’s face for signs of unhappiness: she finds them, even if he denies it; she feels sorry for him even when he complains of nothing; she spies on her daughter-in-law, she criticizes her, she counters all her innovations with the past and the customs that condemn the intruder’s very presence. Each woman understands the beloved’s happiness in her own way: the wife wants to see in him a man through whom she will control the world; the mother tries to keep him by taking him back to his childhood; to the projects of the young wife who expects her husband to become rich or important, the mother counters with the laws of his unchanging essence: he is fragile, he must not tire himself. The conflict between the past and the future is exacerbated when it is the newcomer’s turn to get pregnant. “The birth of children is the death of parents”; here this truth is at its cruelest: the mother who had hoped to live on through her son understands he has condemned her to death. She gave life: life will continue without her; she is no long
er the Mother: simply a link; she falls from the heaven of timeless idols; she is no more than a finished, outdated individual. It is then that in pathological cases her hatred intensifies to the point where she has a neurosis or is driven to commit a crime; it was when her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy was announced that Mme Lefebvre, who had long hated her, decided to kill her.2

  Normally, the grandmother overcomes her hostility; sometimes she obstinately sees the newborn as her son’s alone, and she loves it tyrannically; but generally the young mother and her own mother claim it for their own; the jealous grandmother cultivates an ambiguous affection for the baby, where hostility hides in the guise of concern.

  The mother’s attitude to her grown daughter is very ambivalent: she seeks a god in her son; in her daughter, she finds a double. The “double” is an ambiguous personage; it assassinates the one from which it emanates, as can be seen in the tales of Poe, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and in the story told by Marcel Schwob. Thus the girl condemns her mother to death by becoming a woman; and yet she permits her to survive. The mother’s behavior depends on whether she grasps her child’s healthy development as a promise of ruin or of resurrection.

  Many mothers become rigid in hostility; they do not accept being supplanted by the ingrate who owes them her life; we have often pointed out the coquette’s jealousy of the fresh adolescent who denounces her artifices: a woman who has detested a rival in any woman will hate the rival even in her child; she sends her away, hides her, or finds ways to deprive her of opportunities. A woman who took pride in being the Wife and the Mother in an exemplary and unique way will refuse no less fiercely to give up her throne; she continues to affirm that her daughter is merely a child, and she considers her undertakings to be childish games; she is too young to marry, too delicate to give birth; if she insists on wanting a husband, a home, and children, they will never be more than look-alikes; the mother tirelessly criticizes, derides, or prophesies misfortune. If she can, she condemns her daughter to eternal childhood; if not, she tries to ruin this adult life the daughter is trying to lead on her own. We have seen that she often succeeds: many young women remain sterile, have miscarriages, prove incapable of nursing and raising their children or running their homes because of this evil influence. Their conjugal life becomes impossible. Unhappy and isolated, they will find refuge in the sovereign arms of their mothers. If they resist her, a perpetual conflict will pit them against each other; the frustrated mother largely transfers onto her son-in-law the irritation her insolent daughter’s independence provokes in her.

  The mother who passionately identifies with her daughter is no less tyrannical; what she wants, having acquired mature experience, is to relive her youth: thus will she save her past while saving herself from it; she herself will choose a son-in-law who conforms to the perfect husband she never had; flirtatious and tender, she will easily imagine somewhere in her heart that it is she he is marrying; through her daughter, she will satisfy her old desires for wealth, success, and glory; such women, who ardently “push” their children along the paths of seduction, cinema, or theater, have often been described; under the pretext of watching over them, they take over their lives: I have been told about some who go so far as to take the girl’s suitor to bed with them. But it is rare for the girl to put up with this guardianship indefinitely; the day she finds a husband or a serious protector, she will rebel. The mother-in-law who had begun by cherishing her son-in-law then becomes hostile to him; she moans about human ingratitude, takes the role of victim herself; she becomes in her turn an enemy mother. Foreseeing these disappointments, many women feign indifference when they see their children grow up: but they take little joy from it. A mother must have a rare mixture of generosity and detachment to find enrichment in her children’s lives without becoming a tyrant or turning them into her tormentors.

  The grandmother’s feelings toward her grandchildren are an extension of those she has for her daughter: she often transfers her hostility onto them. It is not only out of fear of public opinion that so many women force their seduced daughter to have an abortion, to abandon the child, to do away with it: they are only too happy to keep her from motherhood; they obstinately wish to keep the privilege for themselves. They readily advise even a legitimate mother to provoke a miscarriage, not to breast-feed the child, or to rid herself of it. They themselves will deny the existence of this impudent little being by their indifference; or else they will spend their time endlessly scolding the child, punishing him, even mistreating him. By contrast, the mother who identifies with her daughter often welcomes the children more avidly than the young woman does; the daughter is disconcerted by the arrival of the little stranger; the grandmother recognizes him: she goes back twenty years in time, she becomes the young woman giving birth again; all the joys of possession and domination her children long ago ceased to give her are returned to her, all the desires of motherhood she had renounced with menopause are miraculously fulfilled; she is the real mother, she takes charge of the baby with authority, and if the baby is given over to her, she will passionately devote herself to him. Unfortunately for her, the young woman is keen to hold on to her rights: the grandmother is authorized only to play the role of assistant that her elders formerly played with her; she feels dethroned; and besides she has to share this with her son-in-law’s mother, of whom she is naturally jealous. Resentment often distorts the spontaneous love she felt at first for the child. The anxiety often observed in grandmothers expresses the ambivalence of their feelings: they cherish the baby insofar as it belongs to them, they are hostile to the little stranger that he is to them, they are ashamed of this enmity. Yet if the grandmother maintains her warm affection for her grandchildren while giving up the idea of entirely possessing them, she can play the privileged role of guardian angel in their lives: recognizing neither rights nor responsibilities, she loves them out of pure generosity; she does not entertain narcissistic dreams through them, she asks nothing of them, she does not sacrifice their future in which she will not be present: what she loves are the little flesh-and-blood beings who are there today in their contingency and their gratuitousness; she is not an educator; she does not represent abstract justice or law. This is where the conflicts that at times set her in opposition to the parents will sometimes arise.

  It may be that the woman has no descendants or is not interested in posterity; lacking natural bonds with children or grandchildren, she sometimes tries to create them artificially with counterparts. She offers maternal tenderness to young people; whether or not her affection remains platonic, it is not necessarily hypocrisy that makes her declare that she loves her young protégé “like a son”: the mother’s feelings, inversely, are love feelings. It is true that Mme de Warens’s competitors take pleasure in generously satisfying, helping, and shaping a man: they want to be the source, the necessary condition, and the foundation of an existence that has passed them by; they become mothers and find their identity in their lovers far more in this role than in the role of mistress. Very often also the maternal woman adopts girls: here again their relations take more or less sexual forms; but whether platonic or carnal, what she seeks in her protégées is her own double, miraculously rejuvenated. The actress, the dancer, the singer, become teachers—they form pupils—and the intellectual woman—such as Mme de Charrière, alone in Colombier—indoctrinates disciples; the devotee gathers spiritual daughters around her; the seductress becomes a madam. It is never pure self-interest that brings such ardent zeal to their proselytizing: they are passionately seeking to reincarnate themselves. Their tyrannical generosity gives rise to more or less the same conflicts as between mothers and daughters united by blood. It is also possible to adopt grandchildren: great-aunts and godmothers gladly play a role similar to that of grandmothers. But in any case, it is rare for a woman to find in posterity—natural or selected—a justification of her declining life: she fails to make the enterprise of these young existences her own. Either she persists in the effort to app
ropriate it, consumed in the struggles and dramas that leave her disappointed and broken; or she resigns herself to a modest participation. This is the most common case. The aged mother and grandmother repress their dominating desires, they conceal their resentments; they are satisfied with whatever their children choose to give them. But then they get little help from them. They remain available facing the desert of the future, prey to solitude, regret, and ennui.

  Here we touch upon the older woman’s tragedy: she realizes she is useless; all through her life, the bourgeois woman often has to resolve the derisory problem: How to kill time? For once the children are raised and the husband has become successful, or at least settled, days drag on. “Women’s handiwork” was invented to mask this horrible idleness; hands embroider, knit, they are busy hands, and they move; it is not a question here of real work, because the object produced is not the goal; it has little importance, and it is often a problem to know what to do with it: one gets rid of it by giving it to a friend or a charitable organization or by cluttering mantelpieces or coffee tables; neither is it a game that reveals the pure joy of existence in its gratuitousness; and it is hardly a diversion because the mind is vacant: it is an absurd distraction, as Pascal described it; with needle or hook, woman sadly weaves the very nothingness of her days. Water-colors, music, or reading have the very same role; the unoccupied woman does not try to extend her grasp on the world in giving herself over to such activities, but only to relieve boredom; an activity that does not open up the future slides into the vanity of immanence; the idle woman begins a book, then puts it down, opens the piano, closes it, returns to her embroidery, yawns, and ends up on the telephone. In fact, she is more likely to seek relief in social life; she goes out, makes visits, and—like Mrs. Dalloway—attaches enormous importance to her parties; she goes to every wedding, every funeral; no longer having any existence of her own, she feeds on the company of others; she goes from being a coquette to a gossip: she watches, she comments; she compensates for her inaction by dispensing criticism and advice to those around her. She gives her experienced advice even to those around her who do not seek it. If she has the means, she holds a salon; in this way she hopes to appropriate undertakings and successes that are not hers; Mme du Deffand’s and Mme Verdurin’s despotism over their subjects is well-known. To be a center of attraction, a crossroads, an inspiration, or to create an “atmosphere” is in itself an ersatz activity. There are other, more direct ways to intervene in the course of the world; in France, there are “charities” and a few “clubs,” but it is particularly true in America that women group together in clubs where they play bridge, hand out literary prizes, or reflect on social improvement. What characterizes most of these organizations on the two continents is that they are in themselves their own reason for existence: the aims they claim to pursue serve only as a pretext. Things happen exactly as in Kafka’s fable: no one is concerned about building the Tower of Babel; a vast city is built around its ideal place, consuming all its resources for administration, growth, and resolving internal dissensions.3 So charity women spend most of their time organizing their organization; they elect a board, discuss its statutes, dispute among themselves, and struggle to keep their prestige over rival associations: no one must steal their poor, their sick, their wounded, their orphans; they would rather leave them to die than yield them to their neighbors. And they are far from wanting a regime that, in doing away with injustice and abuse, would make their dedication useless; they bless the wars and famines that transform them into benefactresses of humanity. It is clear that in their eyes the knit hats and parcels are not intended for soldiers and the hungry: instead, the soldiers and the hungry are made expressly to receive knit goods and parcels.